AI referrals accounted for just 1.1% of visits to news publishers after conversations with AI assistants, according to a new Scrunch study that tracked millions of searches, AI chats, and website visits.
Most publisher visits came through direct navigation or traditional search. Google AI Overviews mostly appeared on news searches that already generated relatively few publisher clicks.
By the numbers. Readers were 20.5 percentage points more likely to visit a news publisher during the week after a news-related AI conversation than after a non-news conversation. The study compared each reader’s browsing history. Scrunch said the results do not show that AI created new demand, only that news-related AI conversations often coincided with continued news reading.
- Among those post-chat visits, about three-quarters came through direct navigation.
- About 9% came from traditional search, and 1.1% carried an AI referrer.
- Scrunch noted that referral data captures only the last click before a visit. It can’t reconstruct the full path across AI conversations, searches, and later website visits.
AI Overviews appeared on lower-click news searches. News searches with an AI Overview generated publisher clicks about 20% of the time, compared with roughly 30% for searches without one.
- When Scrunch compared the same query with and without an AI Overview, the gap shrank to about 2 percentage points.
- The study found that AI Overviews most often appeared on news searches that already produced relatively few publisher clicks.
- During the study period, AI Overviews appeared on about one in four news searches. They were most common for utility-style topics such as weather, market prices, and explainers.
- Sports searches, which had the highest publisher click-through rates, rarely triggered an AI Overview.
Large publishers captured most follow-through visits. When an AI assistant mentioned a publisher that the reader had not included in the prompt, visits to that publisher increased by 10.6 percentage points the next day. They increased by nearly 20 percentage points over the following week, compared with similar publishers not mentioned in the same response. Scrunch described this as a routing signal, not evidence of causation.
- Major publishers accounted for 82% of publisher names volunteered by AI assistants and 97% of follow-through visits.
- Mid-sized publishers made up about 17% of publisher mentions but received a much smaller share of resulting visits.
Why we care. If you measure AI’s impact only through referral traffic, you are likely missing interactions that later lead to direct visits or traditional searches. The study suggests tracking your visibility in AI answers alongside referral data to better understand how people discover your brand.
About the data. The study analyzed millions of searches, AI conversations, and publisher visits from a privacy-safe, opt-in panel between February and June 2026. It measured page visits, not subscriptions, revenue, or time spent.
The study. Surviving the clickpocalypse: What millions of search events say about AI eating the news